New Linklater flick is a love letter to college life

A rag-tag team of college basketball players attempt to have the best weekend of their life before the fall semester starts in “Everybody Wants Some!!” Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

“Everybody Wants Some!!,” a new film from writer-director Richard Linklater, is an ode to the newly acquired freedoms of adulthood that come with starting one’s freshman year in college.

Hailed as a spiritual successor to Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused,” “Everybody Wants Some!!” immerses the audience in the thick of what college life would have been like in the 1980s, complete with vinyl records, pot smoking and vintage cars.

The story follows a motley crew of college baseball players having one final hurrah before the fall semester starts. More specifically, “Everybody Wants Some!!” focuses on one specific baseball player – a freshman named Jake who has just moved in with the rest of the baseball team in a ramshackle house.

Over the course of a single weekend, Jake and his teammates party like there’s no tomorrow (and therein lies the cruel irony – class starts on Monday), hitting up every club in town from a local disco, to a country-western club, to an underground heavy metal club.

The same concepts were re-hashed over and over (drink, smoke, sleep with as many girls as possible), and it just got a little old. The first half of the movie is chock-full of crude jokes and derogatory jabs toward college-age women, which tended to alienate audience members more than amuse.

However, rare moments of insight from the boys made up for what the film lacked in variety of humor.

Throughout the course of the film, Jake and his teammates must come to terms with the fact that there is a good chance that they will not be able to play baseball professionally after college is over.

“Everybody Wants Some!!” is a testament to the freedom to follow one’s passions (and one’s stupid ideas) while they still can.